Guillermo del TOHO presents... Pacific Dim-witted

Rating: 2/10 (14 July 2013)

The year 2009 will be marked as the year in which science fiction films changed ADULT movie-going audiences – at least temporarily.
In this post Avatar/District 9 world, adult filmgoers want and expect more from their sci fi. They aren't satisfied with aliens blowing up the world just for the hell of it any longer, no matter how cool the explosions. Been there, done that.
Avatar and D9 reminded us all that sci fi is most powerful and emotionally satisfying when it has something to say, when the future comments on life in the present. Pacific Rim not only has nothing to say, it says it with way too many words.
Pacific Rim takes sci fi cinema back 50 years – and in this case retro is not a good thing. It's Destroy All Monsters meets The Thunderbirds (and more than a touch of Independence Day). It's a production and story more suited for Japanese actors and bad dubbing than for Hollywood.
Isn't that giant dinosaur-like monster just a Man In A Monster Suit trampling over a scale model of Tokyo?
Where is Raymond Burr?
Our weapons have no effect!!!
Is Godzilla good in this one, or bad?!
Mindless destruction of the planet and special effects can't draw large audiences above the age of puberty, for the moment anyway. 2009's mindless destruction of the planet in "2012" was our last goodbye for that type of fare – for a while anyway. If Elysium, with it's class warfare theme, is a huge hit then I think my analysis that 2009 was a monumental year in sci fi cinema will be proved correct.
Pacific Rim is so dim-witted, childish, derivative, and insulting to the audience that studio heads should roll. The whole film feels like a big budget episode of the Power Rangers – only without the really hot pink Power Ranger to take our mind off the on-screen stupidity.
Guillermo del Toro, generally a terrific and imaginative storyteller, should change his last name to del TOHO in honor of the film company behind Japan's great monster movies.
How strange it will be for Japanese audiences to see a giant monster film dubbed FROM English! It even has the bombastic, Godzilla-like soundtrack nailed perfectly.
Pacific Rim might be a tribute to monster movies of old, but it's a genre not deserving of this childish tribute. At least not from Hollywood. And definitely not for $20 – yes, IMAX 3D cost me $20 here in New York. I could have seen the same movie for free on television at 3 a.m. and have laughed at all the shortcomings – and even enjoyed some of them in the way that bad sci fi can be fun. But the same shortcomings at $20 are a whole lot less amusingly goofball.
Pacific Rim seems to have been created for no other reason than to sell monster toys and robot toys. Instead of turning a toy franchise into a movie franchise, it seems the studio was aiming for the reverse. I don't know how the movie will perform internationally, but here in America it seems that Pacific Rim will generate tons of unsold toy store plastic that will need recycling. Definitely appropriate for the BIG, three dimensional recycling job I saw last night.
(No need to talk about plot or character. It's all tangential to the robot/monster battles. I will say, however, that seeing Idris Elba slumming in this picture is very sad. Watch the first couple episodes of his BBC show "Luther.")
Two stars out of 10.
I would rather have been mining coal.